The present invention relates to a heavy duty pneumatic tire, more particularly to a tread pattern capable of improving traveling performance on snowy roads, without sacrificing uneven wear resistance.
In heavy duty pneumatic tires for trucks, buses and the like, in order to improve the traveling performance on snowy roads, block-based tread patterns have been widely employed. The blocks in the tread portion of such a heavy duty pneumatic tire are liable to cause uneven wear so called heel-and-toe wear. Therefore, in order to improve the resistance to such uneven wear, it has been employed to increase the blocks' circumferential rigidity by decreasing the volume of lateral grooves which circumferentially divide the blocks.
This technique, however, tends to deteriorate traveling performance on snowy roads such as braking performance, traction performance and the like because, in the ground contacting patch of the tire, shearing force of the snow packed into the lateral grooves is decreased.